Hey, been lurking here for a while, but I figured it's about time I actually post something.
http://i.imgur.com/z00EH.jpg

Here's my current map WIP. It's basically just a height map made out of various types of noise pushed and prodded into position with a gradient map overtop.

What I'd like to do is find a way to "Map" biomes based on a couple grayscales (one designating Temperature and one designating wetness), but I can't find anything around that lets me do such things with raster Images. Is there any such things that I am missing that would let me do this?

Next step, barring my Biome problem, is adding some rivers and towns, I think. Found the Fractalize plugin around here for gimp, so I think I'll be using that :).

raejekii

03-21-2011, 12:42 AM

Not bad for a start. Is this your first map?

Furyofaseraph

03-21-2011, 01:15 AM

That it is :).

Working on a maxscript for this biome problem of mine. standby and I'll see what I come up with.

Furyofaseraph

03-21-2011, 04:50 AM

My Biome Result.
http://i.imgur.com/DsI3l.jpg

Furyofaseraph

03-21-2011, 09:25 PM

I'm currently building a slew of fractal noise images at a resolution of 4096x4096. I mean Billows, RidgedMulti, Perlins, with various Octaves, Frequencies, and all sorts of juicy stuffs. Should I zip them up for you folks?

Not sure what happened to my latest version of the map. Going to restart it - I have a few ideas on making a better Rainfall map.
http://i.imgur.com/gW3tc.jpg

Furyofaseraph

03-24-2011, 04:05 PM

I'm trying to add rivers using Wilbur's errosion, but I only ever get really short rivers. - I'm tempted to just fractalize some paths in gimp. Frustrating.

Redrobes

03-24-2011, 11:21 PM

This is real neat and I like it. Its the way I do my kind of maps too. I use a height map and run a terrain simulation and set up the rainfall bitmaps and temperature bitmaps and let the simulation grow plants in the temperate/tropical not too dry regions then the results I shade using a texture mapping shader with the bitmaps controlling the blending. Doing rivers is hard work and I think Wilbur is probably your best bet. Waldronate is the best person to ask about that app but several people around here get some great river patterns using it if you want to have a deep search for those posts. Su-Liam is well up on these noise patterns too and has written some good posts about that kind of thing too.

If you have the height map (esp in 16bit) then you can run my free terrain viewer (http://www.viewing.ltd.uk/cgi-bin/viewingdale.pl?category=dragons_flight) to see it in 3D. It goes up to 2048 but its well slow at that res. If you want to play with that then save a "Height.bmp" and a "Color.bmp" file in the same directory. Along with the usual buttons it lists on the help page, press the numbers 1-8 for specific resolution changes where 1 is something like 128 res then 256, 384, 512, 768, 1024, 1536 and 2048. Prob best to resample both images to 2048 square before starting the app for best effect.

Also, if your generally looking for inspiration in this terrain type area that thing I was doing with the bitmaps is covered with a gallery over here (http://me-dem.me.uk/galleries/gts/gallery.htm) but the app and shader to do it was never released publicly.

Furyofaseraph

03-25-2011, 12:15 AM

Truthfully, I've hung rivers on the wall for now - I'm back to realistic Biome generation. I was using 8-bit greyscale heightmaps, so I had to throw it out in favor of 16-bit. Thusly: the map pictured above is no longer, but a hopefully better one will be along soon.

New map: Biomes are good and done, I think. Back to the River problem, which I think I have a solution for :).
http://i.imgur.com/ZOQJi.jpg

Furyofaseraph

03-25-2011, 05:08 PM

Yeah - I cannot get rivers to fly well at all. If I use the heightmap I generated, I'm lucky if my rivers are 20 pixels long (im working at 4096x4096). If I use the ocean mask and I do a fill-mound, add some noise, fill basins (tried without filling basins either), and the erosion, I get a slew of straight lines on the lower half of the elevation of an incline.